A Pain (or Pleasure) in the Ass
A brief history of butt sex and how it shaped white supremacy, the Taliban, Marxism, and Bill Gates.
Sodomy contra Hospitality:
The word sodomy comes from the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, where two angels visited a man named Lot who lived in Sodom. Lot’s neighbors (read: Sodomites) heard about the visitors and demanded Lot bring them out so that they could “know them”.
The word used for “know” is the Hebrew ידע or yada and is a euphemism for having sex. Earlier in Genisis 4, Adam knows Eve and they have their firstborn Cain. Also, Lot, being a true host, offers his virginal daughters, who have never known men, to his horny crowd of neighbors in lieu of his Angel guests. When the rowdy Sodomites circled around Lot’s house their intention of “knowing” the angels was far from convivial.
Sodom and Gomorrah were both smote with fire and brimstone (or a hail of heavy rocks in the Qur’an) and destroyed due to the inhospitality of the people there. Being a proper host was of utmost importance to the ancient world, Zeus was the patron god of hospitality and hosting strangers. This is why Penelope allowed her suitors to stay for nearly two decades in the Odyssey, it was also why the Cyclops was considered evil, because he ate his guests instead of eating with them.
Scholars differ on whether it was simply the inhospitality or specifically the inhospitable threat of anal rape that was the cause of God’s wrath for the unfortunate town – but regardless of academic dispute, the name Sodom has kept its anal connotations ever since.
Greek Love:
The prurient ancient Greeks believed Helen, the femme fatale of the Trojan war and the Iliad, co-invented sodomy when the founder of Athens, Theseus (then 50) kidnapped her as a 7-year-old and took a backdoor route of acquaintance in order to preserve her sacred virginity.
Pan, the mythical goat-horned creature of unbridled lust, is where we get both the term panic and horny. He made his home in the woods and Greek legend held that he would sodomize anyone who defiled his meadows and streams – unless of course the trespasser was “into” that kind of thing – in which case he would cosh him or her skull with his club.
Zeus had an ephebic male cup-bearer and lover named Ganymede, described as the most beautiful of mortals. His Latin name Catamitus is where the term catamite comes from.
The Greeks are famous for practicing pederasty, where older males would maintain relationships with younger ones to develop and mature them. This practice putatively originated with the Dorians, the race of the Spartans, and it gives new context and backstories to the movie 300.
Though practiced in the aristocracy, the Greeks had a very complicated relationship with pederasty and homosexuality at large. Plato and Xenophon both chastise homosexuality. Aristotle considered it a disease. Lycurgus, the famous Spartan lawgiver (whose bust resides in the US capitol building) forbade it. De gustibus non est disputandum. Common insults or slurs were to call a man euruproktos, "wide-anused," or katapugon, "a pathic."
Greek society was one of the most misogynistic cultures to have ever existed. They had at their core a deep distrust and fear of women arising from their chthonic sexual power. They believe Zeus created Pandora, the first woman on earth, as man’s punishment for Prometheus’ theft of fire. And the opening of Pandora’s jar (not box) brought man all his troubles. Socrates would start each day with a prayer of thanks that he was born a man and not a woman.
The Greeks saw the male bottom as taking on an ersatz female role. The term Kinaidoi was the name applied to the pathic. Any male found to have been penetrated as such stood to lose his rights as a citizen and ability to speak in the Senate. Aeschines famously (and unsuccessfully) attempted to prosecute Timarchos as such. The penetrator could also face severe consequences.
The extent to which these rules were enforced was then and is still now up for debate. The common get-around in pederastic relationships was to rely on intercrural – i.e. between the legs – sex (aka a thighjob) without anal penetration, thereby protecting the rights of both parties.
Despite all the past and present controversy, the term Greek love remains a common stand in for homosexuality.
Buggery and the Birth of Romance:
Sodomy and buggery are synonymous and throughout much of the medieval world were viewed by the church as criminal acts against the laws of nature.
The word buggery comes from the old French word for Bulgarian, where a heretical gnostic Christian sect was flourishing called the Bogomils. Bogomil is old Slavic for “lover of God” (same root as Bulgarian fwiw) – so when someone was persecuted for buggery they were technically incriminated for having anal sex with God.
In 1167 a grand council was held in the church where these heretics were accused of, among other deviant acts, of practicing butt sex as a means of avoiding procreation. The connotation between buggery and sodomy has stuck ever since.
A splinter group of the Bogomils landed in Albi (modern day southern France) and became tremendously popular. This group became known as the Albigensians, also called the Cathars because lore said they worshipped Satan in the form of a cat.
These Gnostics were far from the only concupiscent religious groups. The Sabbatian and Frankish Jewish sects were both infamous for their ceremonious wife-swapping orgies. The Carpocratians believed in an extreme form of gnosis where since the entire material world was evil, the people might as well sin as much as they pleased.
The Bogomil movement, however, was hugely influential. So much so that to squash it the Catholic church enacted the first inquisition and one of the largest crusades ever decreed against Christians. A bit later, the Dominican order of friars was established to explicitly combat Catharism. Ironically enough it would be the buggerers in their own church that Catholics would have to protect from punishment centuries later, yet still without official imprimatur.
At the same time that Catharism was taking off, another group directly influenced by them, the troubadours were taking root in this same southern region of France. The Troubadour’s ribald poetry and rowdy acts, used to court and woo the fair ladies of the court, are the root of European chivalry and romance.
In the Ordeal of Civility, Cuddihy lays out how the practice of romantic chivalry set Christian Europe apart from other contemporaneous cultures like the Jews and Muslims who relied on arranged marriage systems. Costin Alamariu in Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy points to European chivalry and courtsmanship, along with the church’s enforcement of monogamy and banning of cousin-marriage as providing a de facto program of eugenics that shaped and crafted white western man. In essence, buggery led directly to white supremacy.
Taxpayer-Backed Pedophilia:
The Muslim world has its own history of butt sex. Bacha Bazi, Persian literally for “boy play.” Is the trafficking in prepubescent “dancing boys” for the entertainment of adult men. It is common practice across central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.
In this area, between the 30th and 43rd degrees of northern latitude, the 19th century British adventurer Richard Francis Burton believed to exist the “Sotadic Zone.” In this region Burton proposed that either climate, the ugliness of the women, or some mix of both lead to higher rates of homosexuality and pederasty.
Medieval Arabic poetry is rich with love poems dedicated to beautiful young boys. Abu Nuwas, perhaps the most famous of these desert bards made a habit of homoerotic lyrics and allegedly used Quaranic verses to seduce young men to sleep with him.
These profligate practices were frowned upon by the more zealous religious adherents. The backlash to Bacha Bazi would directly lead to the mobilization of many extreme reactionary groups including the Taliban. Putting those fighting the Taliban, (i.e. the US Army) in the awkward situation of often having to side with the boy rapists.
It should be noted that this was not anything necessarily new for the Derp State, in the 1980’s many CIA affiliated actors along with bigwigs in the Republican party were implicated in child sexual trafficking with the Franklin Scandal. Never forget that Republican Speaker of the House (that’s 3rd in line to the presidency), Dennis Hastert, was convicted of sexually abusing young boys while in office. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Despite the best efforts of US tax dollars, the anti-sodomy coalition in Islam has largely won out in the kulturkampf. In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the UAE, and Qatar, same-sex actions are punishable by death. In Egypt there have been largescale book burnings of scabrous, homoerotic medieval Arabic poetry. As former Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, proudly boasted on Columbia university’s campus in 2007 “in Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”
A Venereal Revolution:
The sexual revolution of the 60’s was marked by an explosion of erotic practice and experimentation. The New Left in particular pushed the free love movement, believing it to combat traditional conservative mores and capitalistic ideals. Many Marxist rebel groups like the Weather Underground (who bombed the US Capitol), or the Symbionese Liberation Army (who kidnapped Patty Hearst) would embark in raucous, drug-filled, mandatory orgies.
These sexual practices were marked by experimentation outside of heterosexual norms as well. Jim Jones, leader of the socialist People’s Temple (who counted among their supporters Angela Davis and Harvey Milk), would claim that he was the only straight man on earth and prove it by sodomizing the male members of his cult. Jones’ cult would end in mass-suicide in Guyana – but the practices of the 60’s sexual revolution lived on and led directly to the gay sexual liberation in the 70’s and 80’s.
Promiscuity was at no less an extreme within the new gay counterculture. In a profile of gay Jewish doctor and activist Dr. Joseph Sonnabend the scene is described:
“After fighting for the freedom to be themselves, they didn't want to hear about restraint. Indeed, for a large part of the male gay community, freedom was not simply the ability to love other men without legal or social restraint; it was defined in terms of sexual promiscuity. For many, to be young and gay and liberated in New York City meant having anonymous sex with two, three, four partners a night, night after night, year after year.”
In Stayin' Alive: The Invention Of Safe Sex, gay liberation activist Michael Callan is recounted as saying:
“I estimate I've had approximately 3,000 men up my butt... I estimate that I went to the baths at least once a week, sometimes twice, and that each time I went I had a minimum of four partners... I also racked up about three men a week for five years at the Christopher Street bookstore...Then of course there was the MineShaft; the orgies; the 55th Street Playhouse; the International Stud backroom...”
Unfortunately, this licentiousness also led to a glut of disease. In a later excerpt from the above, Callan recounts the numerous STD’s, liver infections, and gastrointestinal parasites he acquired through his dissolute years before ultimately succumbing to AIDS.
A handsome, Quebecois, flight attendant, Gaetan Dugas, was known as “patient zero” of the AIDS epidemic with over 40 of the first 260 cases of diagnosed AIDS being traced to him. Dugas attested to having over 2,500 sexual partners and refused abstinence even after being diagnosed with AIDS and breaking out in the disfiguring scabs of Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Tragically, the AIDS epidemic was a blight to the sexually liberated gay community. In San Francisco by 1984 doctors estimated that north of 60% of the sexually active gay population was infected with HIV.
The early politics and science of the AIDS epidemic are fascinating in their own right and full of interesting factoids to ponder over. For one example it was noted that within the gay fisting community (men who would insert their hand into another’s anus) the fister was more likely to contract AIDS than the fistee.
Another interesting fact is highlighted by the late, LSD-taking, Nobel Laureate Kari Mullis, who invented the PCR test, is that there is no scientific study directly linking HIV to AIDS. Mullis, Peter Duesberg, and other scientists believe that the diagnosis of AIDS may be more related to the compounded immunosuppressive effects of environmental toxins, heavy drug use, and other sexual infections. Go down that rabbit hole at your own peril, bringing this topic up (not even arguing in favor of it as I am personally agnostic) has gotten me kicked out of more than one genteel establishment.
Combatting AIDS is big business: Anthony Fauci first made a fortune from the AIDS medication AZT then made a name for himself as a public health figure combatting the disease in the 80’s. The Gates foundation operates as a tax haven under the fig-leaf of combatting AIDS (and other diseases) in Africa. To quote Baron Rothschild’s investment advice: “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.” I assume the same goes for other bodily fluids.
So that’s the quick ‘n dirty on anal sex and all it has led to: hospitality, Greek lore, chivalry, white supremacy, beautiful Arabic poetry, the Taliban, radical Marxism, dangerous conspiracy theories, and massive funding for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Until next time,
Zay